Are you going to release any more achievements? I have a great idea for an achievement. Where can I suggest it?

Yes, we are planning to release more achievements for Visual Studio. Please use the Q&A section of the achievements extension to make suggestions for future achievements.

I performed the action of a progress-based achievement multiple times (aka, "Used 'Organize Usings' 50 times") but it only updated the counter once. What gives?

You can only earn progress-based achievements once a minute.

I did what I was supposed to earn an achievement, but it didn't unlock.

Some achievements are a bit finicky; there may be multiple ways to accomplish the task in Visual Studio but only one way to unlock the achievement. Keep your eye on the Q&A section of the achievements extension for additional discussion about individual achievements.

Once the extension is installed, there is a menu item called Achievements, under the Tools menu:

How do I see my achievements on Channel9?

Once you've installed the extension, an achievements page gets created on Channel9 at https://channel9.msdn.com/niners/username/achievements/visualstudio. This lists all your achievements, both locked and unlocked. You can find a link to this page on your profile page, which looks like this:

I installed it but it doesn't work at all! What gives?

Is there an underscore in your username? There was a bug with Version 1.0 of the extension if that is the case. Version 1.1 of the Visual Studio Achievements Extension addresses this issue of users with an underscore in their Channel9 username. If you installed version 1.0 of the extension and registered with a username that had an underscore, you will need to take the following steps.

I installed it and I can earn achievements, but the server never gets updated.

Version 1.2 (uploaded 2/2/2012) should address the experience where you were able to install the extension and VS notified you that you earned achievements, but then your profile was never updated on Channel9.There's no reason to upgrade to this build otherwise. We believe many people reporting issues with proxies will be fixed by this build.

In specific, some proxies were sending a Expect: 100-Continue header from the HttpWebRequest class, which the server wasn't prepared to handle. The fix was to set the static System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue property to false.

Also, when you upgrade your extension, if you get a certificate mismatch error, install this hotfix: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=38654, which will address updating this extension and any other extensions. If you don't want to install the hot fix, you can manually uninstall the extension and then reinstall with the new version.If you are still having issues with your proxy server and this build doesn't solve your problems, please post here and we will continue to investigate the proxy problem.

Some of these achievements promote bad coding practices. Aren't you doing a disservice to engineers by giving badges for bad coding practices?

A few of thoughts on that. First, the "Don't Try This At Home" category was designed to be playful -- in jokes for developers. Second, any badges in that category award zero points. Third, all of the awards in this category are pretty egregious, except perhaps the GOTO achievement, which is a source of contention, as it turns out! Ultimately, one goal of VS Achievements is to add some humor to the levity of coding.

The Visual Studio team should be spending time working on the product, not turning the IDE into a game! What's up with that?

This project is a Coding For Fun project built by the Channel9 team; no Visual Studio product devs were deployed in the making of this add-in!